Alien Girlybrain

Twice now while restoring from backups I have run into a situation where I am told I do not have full access to my files. This manifests itself as a demand for my password when I try to delete a file or folder which has been restored from a backup. Getting info on the affected file(s) shows that I have "custom access". The culprit? Access Control Lists. This can get quite frustrating, because it's utterly ridiculous. I own my files. There's nobody else who can claim ownership of my files, because it's *MY* computer and there are no other user accounts on it. But because there's some sort of glitch, occasionally the system will think there are two users named bruce, one with full and proper access and the other without any access. Hence the confusion. Not knowing which bruce I might be, the system freaks out and asks for my password. Annoying, but easily repairable.

This command (sans quotes, of course): "chmod -R -N ~" will strip all ACLs from the user's home directory. If you wish to make sure your entire filesystem is scrubbed clean, you'll want to make that "chmod -R -N /" instead. Open the terminal, copy and paste whichever command you want to use and hit enter. That's it. You're done. You will now have full and proper access to your own files and you can delete them without let or hindrance, the way God intended.